Stories about the allure of wealth are part of a rich literary tradition

I was one of those weirdos who was perversely addicted to the media frenzy a dozen years ago surrounding Bernie Madoff ’s Ponzi scheme. Of course I acknowledged the enormity of the tragic consequences for many of Madoff ’s investors. Nevertheless, I gobbled up every detail about the scandal, right down to stories about his wife, Ruth, whose exclusive Manhattan hair salon, florist and favorite Italian restaurant declared her persona non grata.

Now comes Emily St. John Mandel, whose new novel, “The Glass Hotel,” includes a Madofflike character. (St. John Mandel’s last novel, “Station Eleven,” was about a flu epidemic that wiped out most of the world’s population. Although it was widely praised, I’d suggest this might not be the ideal time to pick it up.)

St. John Mandel takes some liberties with the Madoff story. Her main character, Jonathan Alkatis, is a widower who takes up with a young trophy wife, Vincent, and the novel winds up centering more on Vincent and her junkie brother Paul.

But “The Glass Hotel” is mostly about money. Several times in the novel Vincent, swept from her life as a bartender barely making ends meet into a world of penthouses and recreational shopping, reflects on what she calls the “kingdom” of money: “What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money.”

Contrasting with the money kingdom is what St. John Mandel calls the “shadow country” of poverty. One of the characters fleeced by Alkatis, a former shipping executive, is reduced to living in an RV, picking up seasonal work at campgrounds. His reflections on the invisibility of the poor and homeless take the novel into the territory of meaningful social commentary.

Fiction about money has a long, rich (pun intended) tradition, ranging from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (1596) through Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (1797), Henry James’ “Portrait of a Lady” (1881) and Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” (1905).

Money was certainly a favorite topic of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who himself was notoriously bad about money and turned to work in Hollywood to maintain his extravagant lifestyle with his wife, Zelda. His most characteristic plotline, revolving around the efforts of young men of humble backgrounds attempting to prove themselves worthy of the daughters of a wealthier class, came from his own life; he courted debutantes only to be rejected as not wealthy enough. Zelda agreed to marry him only after the success of “This Side of Paradise.”

The Jay Gatsby of his bestknown work, “The Great Gatsby,” is a nouveauriche bootlegger who surrounds himself with the vulgar trappings of wealth to win back his lost love, Daisy, whose voice Fitzgerald describes as “full of money.”

Fitzgerald’s famous saying about the rich being different, often misquoted by Ernest Hemingway, comes from his short story “The Rich Boy”: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

By the time Tom Wolfe published his money novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” in 1987, the classbased society of Austen, Wharton, Fitzgerald et al. had almost vanished. The gogo investment banking world of 1980s New York was all about cold, hard cash. The protagonist, “Master of the Universe” Sherman McCoy, is going broke on $980,000 a year. (Funny how, in our age of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, a million bucks seems like chump change.)

It appears money will always be fertile territory for novelists. Writing about money means taking a deep dive into the complexities of desire and power and greed and attachment and envy and insecurity and confidence.

I’ll leave you with the final part of Philip Larkin’s poem “Money”:

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down

From long French windows at a provincial town,

The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.